


Beat Me at My Own Damn Game

by HarpiaHarpyja



Series: How Soon Unaccountable [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Actual Force Nerd Kylo Ren, Canon Compliant, Communing on the Astral Plane, F/M, Force Bond (Star Wars), Gen, Hand Touching For Science, Meditation, Mutual Pining, Post TLJ, Reylo - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-03-13 16:17:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13574247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarpiaHarpyja/pseuds/HarpiaHarpyja
Summary: After agreeing to put the limits of their Force connection to the test, Rey and Kylo Ren explore the implications of paired meditation.





	Beat Me at My Own Damn Game

**Author's Note:**

> The events of this story occur a few weeks after the first story of this series (Death Before Decaf and Other Lies) but can be taken as a stand-alone, especially if you prefer the pining turned slightly up and like your fics with more out-of-body experiences and less unintended beverage sharing via the astral plane. Future stories may come with a slightly higher rating.

Kylo Ren once held his aptitude for meditation a point of personal pride. It honed his anger, attuned him to his darker impulses, fettered the lighter. It weaponized his entire being. It was a thing he was gifted at and relied on. Some part of him hated it, too, because of the way it seemed to break him each time it fortified his power. It arrayed his weaknesses before him, subjugated him to them, and provoked him into feeding anything that could desensitize him to the fractures in his resolve. 

And now he could not remember the last time he took to the practice. Acutely aware of the neglect every hour since he awoke, he gave in to the compulsion practically as soon as he was alone. Sitting on the floor in the cold light of his chambers, Kylo closed his eyes, and he tried. That he had to try was the first sign of a problem. It was too quiet—being, he realized with dread, truly alone in it for the first time. 

For more than a month, the presence that once surveilled, measured, nudged, stoked, and twisted thought and feeling for longer than he knew had been gone. It would not return. He should have been glad. But the freedom this knowledge granted left him perturbed by what he experienced instead. Part of him was missing; which was not true, but the fact that it _felt_ true left Kylo sick with what remained. Alone in his own mind, he was lost. He did not trust his emotions or his assessment of them, and he had only himself and his actions to account for. 

What once brought illusions of clarity only caused his thoughts to float out of grasp. Within him was a void through which light wended in the dark, light he felt deficient in the face of and less compelled to dominate even as it receded. 

Ambient sound rushed away and flattened into a wash of white noise. For a moment, as the light teased the frayed edges of his mind’s eye, Kylo could swear he heard a voice from distant memory speaking the name he was unable to keep from thinking—

 _Rey_?

She was here. He didn’t need to look to know it. His concentration thwarted, Kylo now suspected his decision to return to meditation had been some subconscious move to provoke this very reaction in the Force. If that was the case, at least he could count it a success over how utterly he’d failed otherwise. Still, he didn’t immediately make to indicate his awareness of Rey’s presence. She would know he’d sensed it either way, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk. He remained instead with eyes closed, posture primed, motionless, listening. 

The quiet was altered only minutely by a faint sound of intermittent scratching. Kylo cracked an eye open and raised his chin to look at Rey. She was sitting crossed-legged, her dark hair drawn up to the top of her head in a bun from which a good deal of it was escaping. She was relaxed, or had been until she felt the shift that told her she was no longer alone. There was an aged book resting open on one of her knees. She was absently running a fingernail in short strokes back and forth over the margin of a page. Something else rested in her lap, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

Rey, who had already been watching him with a sober expression, only spoke when she caught his eye. “What are you doing?” 

It was as fair a greeting as either of them ever exchanged. That she failed to recognize the standard posture made him think, smugly, that Skywalker must have given her some truly poor instruction during her time with him. Kylo unbent his legs and let the feeling begin to return to them before shifting to his knees, folding his legs under him and settling his weight on the back of his heels. 

“Meditation.”

“Oh. Right.” There was familiarity with the ritual in her reaction after all. Her eyebrows rose a fraction and her eyes narrowed, like she didn’t quite believe it was something he would be given to doing but couldn’t think of a realistic alternative. “Well, don’t let me interrupt.”

“You’re not.” Admittedly, it was interesting to consider what might come of tuning himself back into the Force at the level of meditation when it was simultaneously working something so strong and tangible between him and Rey. But that seemed a thing that would require, at the bare minimum, her awareness and consent to his intention to explore it in that way. Even with the former, the latter was not a thing he was confident she would give at present, to say nothing of the mental blocks he was already facing. “It’s easier done alone. I’ll wait.”

She shrugged. “Suit yourself.” 

Kylo cocked his head and peered at her from the distance, trying to discern what else she was holding. “You?”

“What?” 

“What are you doing right now?” 

It seemed almost criminal to Kylo that this was the sort of exchange the bond was being reduced to facilitating: contrived niceties bandied back and forth. He and Rey both knew there was such potential here for more, and they both continued to make choices that saw it impossible to mine any of it. That they were at least civil wasn’t much consolation when the possibilities were so tantalizing.

“I’m studying.” Rey saw the way his eyes were fixed on whatever she was working at, and she flipped the book shut. Kylo recognized its cover immediately. His gut twisted as memories associated with it flared in the half-second it took for him to suppress them. 

Yet her movement also made it easier for him to see what else she was holding: a mess of looped wires, bits of metal and jumbled circuits, a thin cylinder that was almost certainly a power cell. Much was unaccounted for, including several crucial pieces, but Kylo knew that he was looking at the early stages of a lightsaber hilt. In his agitation, he could draw only one conclusion.

“Did you lose the lightsaber?”

“What? Of course not.” 

She was taken off guard, but it was in a way he hadn’t expected. Rey didn’t look like a person caught trying to hide something. Instead, she was surprised by something he didn’t know but that she did. To her credit, she did not to try to conceal what he’d already seen, though one of her hands traveled to touch the collection of components protectively. 

“Then who is that for?” 

“It’s—I thought you knew.” A small frown crinkled between Rey’s eyebrows as she debated with herself what more to divulge. “It split. Almost perfectly in half, when we fought for it.”

 _When you turned on me. When you tried to take it and leave_ , he thought. One hand flexed into a fist where it rested on his leg, and he had to consciously relax it. They’d been over this some time ago. He now knew betrayal and abandonment were not what Rey had intended on the _Supremacy_ , but it was one thing to know something was true and another to accept it. He wasn’t there yet.

Rey took his silence as a indication to go on, though she had no doubt noticed the way his demeanor hardened. “It’s broken, but not irreparable. I’m trying to fix it. Make something new. But it’s . . . difficult.”

Her mouth pursed as if the admission of her struggle was bitter on her tongue. Kylo still hadn’t decided how to respond to this news, particularly because it became more unsettling with each detail she added. He had grown complaisant on the matter of Rey’s possession of the lightsaber—his legacy—to a degree he hadn’t expected. At least he knew where it was, and with whom. It had chosen her as he had, once. But to hear that it now lay broken in some unknown rebel base shook his assumption that it was in worthy hands, even as his rational mind told him that Rey had not been the sole cause for its fracture.

Then there was her implication that she was, in rebuilding the saber, making it something new altogether. Something her own. She was clever and capable and doing all she could to restore its integrity. Nevertheless, he still felt possessive of the saber and what it represented in its true form. The result was a roil of complex emotion that made his jaw clench as he struggled with an impulse to be unreasonable. 

“I see.”

Rey didn’t sound particularly thrilled either when she added, half to herself, “I built a bloody computer on my own when I was barely more than a kid. This shouldn’t be so hard.”

Somehow her petulant, almost juvenile take on the situation extinguished some of the negativity swelling in Kylo’s thoughts as he processed the revelation. He scoffed anyway, heedless of how imperious he sounded when he said, “Then the first thing you should realize is that constructing a lightsaber is in a completely different league than rigging up a flight simulator from trash you found scattered in a desert.”

“Good to know.” Her voice was even, but she looked like she had barely managed to stop herself from rolling her eyes. He almost wished she had.

“I take it you’re using the focusing crystal from the original saber.”

“I haven’t got any others, obviously. It’s been damaged—cracked—but . . . I can still feel it. Hear it. It wants to be mended. So yes, I’m using it.” 

The new edge in her voice told him he was annoying her. But it also suggested that she was fully aware of the crystal’s significance, not only to him but as a storied relic deserving of dignity, and was insulted by his implication that she might not be. This made him feel nearly penitent for his condescension shortly before, and he sighed. 

“I can help you. If you want. It would be a better use of these times.”

“No.” 

Rey hadn’t even given the offer a second of consideration, which deflated Kylo further as his vexation burnt itself out entirely and was replaced by the thought that he should not have been surprised. Refusing him was her way.

But then she added, “Thank you. It’s something I need to do myself. I work better that way, I always have. You’d be too distracting.”

He indulged a spare moment to wonder what exactly would have been distracting about his helping her on such a very specific task, one in which he was experienced. Whatever the source, though, distraction was a valid concern. Building a lightsaber was complex, and it could be dangerous. It required finely tuned attention. Rey possessed all the qualities required but specialized knowledge, and that was easily amended.

“I’ll try to take that as a positive.”

“Actually, you’re distracting now, too. So, like your meditation, my studies will wait.” Rey was moving her book and the saber pieces out of her lap. The objects disappeared from his view entirely when she broke contact with them. He thought it likely she simply wanted to hide them from him. “And you had some other ideas for how we might better use the time when this happened two weeks ago, if I recall correctly.”

The indication that she, like him, remembered how long had passed since their last conversation was gratifying, though it also uncentered him just enough that he didn’t immediately know what she was referring to. 

“Passing things,” she prompted, her growing impatience evident. “Somehow testing the limits of whatever’s happening here.”

“Oh, yeah.” Kylo blinked to stop himself staring at her. He stood and began to pace slowly, relieving the pins-and-needles sensation in his legs. “You did indicate some very begrudging interest.”

“I wouldn’t have called it that, but sure.” 

“Haven’t developed a newfound love of caf since then, have you?”

Rey hesitated over how to take his comment, but she responded lightly enough. “Definitely not. I prefer anything we accomplish be intentional this time.”

There was an alertness in Rey’s eyes and a general shift in the mood that had not been there during their previous encounter, when they’d both been worn down and floundered through the time allowed them. The time of day wasn’t so different—later, even, if he remembered right, even if time was somewhat relative when the interaction spanned light years and who knew what hour it was for her—so he didn’t think the change could be attributed to that. Meditation, even poorly executed and interrupted, may have helped on his end. As for Rey, there was a pulse from her that was unusual, but he couldn’t speculate on its origins.

“So.” She clapped her hands together once and stretched both legs out in front of her, holding them taut for a few seconds and then climbing to her feet. A few steps later she crouched and began rummaging for something. “I don’t want to go on at length about this, but I have some things here that, I dunno, I can try handing over to you. If that’s still what we’re doing.”

Kylo glanced around the spare dimness of his room. He really hadn’t had a plan for this in place, largely because he hadn’t expected Rey to be game at all. 

“Actually. I think we should try something different first.” He said it before he’d fully processed the idea himself, and almost reneged immediately, but she snapped it up.

“Different how?” 

He wanted to swiftly divest her of any wrong impressions, so he stopped pacing and looked at her directly. “The meditation. I think it could help, if we both do it together. You’ve done it before.”

“Only a few times,” she qualified, still skeptical. “And you said yourself, it’s easier alone.”

“Yes, but the way it opens a person up to the Force . . . it’s highly likely that’s related to how the Force is doing this between us. And if we can apply the same principles and techniques used in meditation practice to this, somehow, it might allow us to exercise some control over it.”

“Open or close it at will, you mean.”

“Maybe. Or to better sense when it’s going to happen, at least to the point that it isn’t constantly taking us by surprise.”

Rey’s head bobbed noncommittally. “It’s sound enough reasoning. I just wonder, that approach, it’s not going to put us in each other’s heads again, is it? If we did something like that in unison?”

“I don’t know.” Kylo figured it was best to be completely frank on that point, though he couldn’t quite conceive lying to her anyway. “If it does, we stop.”

He knew that what he was asking must feel a great deal riskier to her than trying to hand him some benign trinket through the bridge. It was riskier to him, too. 

“Why do you trust me so much to do this?” she asked, reading the thought on his face, seeing an opportunity.

Suddenly she’d covered most of the distance between them. She was near enough that he could have touched her, as close as she’d been in the turbolift. Challenging him and utterly fearless, then and now: pursuing his eyes with hers, drinking his face in, seeking the cracks. Of course she wasn’t afraid at all. She had no reason to be and knew it. 

“Every single time. All you’re interested in is why this is happening, _talking_ . . . I thought I knew why the Force was doing this, and I was so—” She shook her head. “I don’t understand why you still don’t just want me gone instead. Like you do everything else that’s hurt you.”

Though her voice was steady enough, her whole body was bunched and frustrated, and her eyes dared him to memorize their spark in the moment. The light where she was deepened the agitated lines around her mouth. Kylo briefly, desperately wanted to trace them with a thumb to see what she would do, if she would let him, if she would come nearer still. He swallowed and grimaced.

“You know why.”

Rey twitched and huffed, but she dipped her chin in a tight nod.

“Rey.” When her eyes met his again, her confidence had already rebuilt itself. She was sizing him up once more, waiting for something.

He didn’t want to say it like this, but if he gave her the opportunity to demand he do so— _Why, Ben? Say it._ —he knew he wouldn’t be able to stop himself. He didn't want to hear her say it for him, either. It was his to do. 

Or not. He appealed instead to her reason. 

“Last time, you said we aren’t allies, or partners. I know that. But we are _equals_. You know as well as I do what we’re capable of together. Whatever the Force is doing, it isn’t some accident. Can you even say when it really started? I don't mean the first time. There was . . . something before.”

The hardness of her stare pinned him to the spot, but her voice was soft. “I know.” 

“All I propose is that we try something in the spirit of making this work in our favor.”

She mulled this over, her eyes darting from him to something off to her right, her chin set. He couldn’t tell if she was thinking of what he’d just said, or the charged exchange that preceded it.

“We’ll see.” Rey peeled off a little, stiff-backed and uncertain. “Rules, though. The moment something is off—seeing things, hearing things, anything that feels _wrong_ —we’re done with it. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

She looked up at him, no longer on the attack but keenly searching his face for anything that might sow doubt. He looked back at her more coolly than he felt and waited. “Are you ready?”

“Sure.” Rey turned from him and dropped to the ground in a motion that was smooth and economically graceful, automatically assuming the position she’d found him in when this started. 

He followed suit, turned his back to her and sat, legs crossed, hands resting on knees, leaving space between his back and hers until they both stilled. He heard Rey exhale heavily and imagined that her eyes had already fallen shut. He imagined, too, her face serene in the way he’d only seen when their sabers clashed at the chasm’s mouth on Starkiller. He was fixated by the thought of her like that, envious of her ability to be so seemingly untroubled by the immediacy of the unknown. Kylo closed his eyes only when he felt confident the image wouldn’t greet him the moment he did so. 

But it was as difficult to focus now as it had been earlier. He berated himself again. He’d done this countless times; the ritual should have required little pretense. Yet when he tried to recognize his emotions, face them, let them drop away, empty himself, they evaded him. He wasn’t experiencing anger, or hatred, or anything he might have been able to use at one time. 

There was pain, but when he examined it he found it was rooted in the fact that this shared experience wouldn’t last, was out of his control, was a flash of something he couldn’t keep. There was also fear, that this time might be the last, that the Force would close them off from each other, or worst of all, that Rey would find a way to do so herself. It was not easy to face any of this, let alone grapple with it, with her sitting right there, close enough that he could feel the warmth of her body rising through her thin shirt while he tried to pace his breathing with hers.

Kylo wasn’t sure how much time passed. It may only have been a minute, enough in silence that he half expected to find Rey gone. Then her voice cleaved his drifting thoughts and his eyes snapped open. 

“This isn’t working.” She sounded displeased. “Right?”

Her sentiments matched his exactly, but she also sounded accusing. She knew which of them was having a problem. He only nodded. Rey was still muttering like she didn’t care whether or not he could make out her words. 

“Hang on. I think I . . .” She shifted and crawled until she was sitting to his left and facing the same direction he was, her knee bare inches from his. She was deliberating something again as her eyes closed. Without opening them to look at him, she said, “I’m going to touch you. Put my hand on yours. I know it's probably not traditional, only I feel like it might . . . help. Is that all right?”

His breath caught a little, which he immediately cursed because he knew she had heard it at such close proximity. “Yes.”

“OK. Tell me if anything weird happens when I do, and I’ll stop.”

It was something they should be careful with, he thought, given what had happened the last time they touched through the Force. Kylo knew their visions had been manipulated then, but he also believed there was something real at their root. He didn’t know what would happen if he and Rey touched that way again without an insidious outside influence warping the results. In fact he was a little afraid to find out, and he wanted to treat the matter with care. 

He also doubted it was a request she would make lightly. She thought there was something to be gained by it. So he closed his eyes once more and waited, thinking she could just as well change her mind, or be gone. 

Her movements were slow and so deliberate that he was hyper-aware of each of them. She touched the back of his left hand lightly at first, as if acclimating to his skin and the lines of bones and tendons, waiting to see if he flinched away. Her fingers were cool and strong, rough with calluses, deft and certain in their movements. Gently, she turned his hand over, guiding it to rest back on his knee and spreading his fingers straight to expose his palm. Then she pressed her palm to his, applying the slightest pressure, the heels of their hands aligning as a single small tremor passed between them. 

But that was it. No visions or flashes of something undefined. Just an odd sort of tranquility.

Rey exhaled again and he could sense her easing into the invisible flow of the Force around and between them, becoming at once more distant and inexplicably nearer. Kylo found it surprisingly easy to follow suit. It wasn’t like their first attempt, when he’d only been conscious of her physical presence. Which was strange, because the current arrangement should have made him more so. Instead, he was able to settle up what he was feeling, clear his consciousness, and tether himself to the energy of the Force with nearly no effort at all. 

He could feel Rey, too, an undercurrent just below the Force’s pull. This wasn’t the way of meditation with the constant awareness of another lurking, the way of darkness ebbing from within and without until there was no discernible source or end to its sway. Rey was just there, a neutral and stabilizing presence he felt driven to orbit.

 _Wow._ A fuzz of silence. _Ben?_

Kylo thought he was truly hearing her voice at first. But no, it was something else, a buzz of unfiltered thought and emotion threading through what they were tapping into and directly into his awareness.

_I’m here._

_Do you feel that?_

Despite the lack of conventional cues, her question left the impression of a whisper. He had an immediate, innate understanding of her tone and meaning and of what she was asking about, like he had asked it himself. Had he? It was something in the way the strains of the Force and he and she interacted, braided together and yet distinct.

 _Yeah._ He quieted his mind for a moment. _And you, too._

A pause. _Same. I can feel you. I don’t know how to describe it. Not quite energy. It’s just . . . you. Distilled, almost. Does that make sense?_

_Yes._

He was warm. Not physically; he actually wasn’t very aware of his body right now, or even of her hand laid over his. He wasn't sure if she was still in the room at all, in whatever way she’d been there to begin with. It didn't seem important. Matter itself didn’t seem important. It was difficult to discern what was light and dark, himself and herself, the concepts of self and the greater Force. Everything that was him and her and it was simultaneously concentrated and diffused in the essence of their very existence. He’d never experienced anything like it before.

_We could just . . ._

. . . _stay like this_ . . .

. . . _until it ends._

He didn’t know who said it first, who continued, and who finished it. Maybe it had just been her, or him, or some suggestion by the Force. But it felt right, and they did. 

When he was drawn back out, his eyes coaxed open by a change he couldn’t voice—something dropping out of alignment, a tiny alteration in the core of him, the fading hum of a plucked mandoviol chord—it didn’t immediately occur to him that the shift was that of her departure. The body he hadn’t realized was levitating inches from the ground, Kylo Ren’s body, settled onto a floor that didn’t feel real. 

He could still perceive the ghost of her presence. A being that mirrored and met him in so many ways but of such raw, ferocious, agonizing hope as to be terrifyingly alien. Everything she was, collapsed into a pinhole of light he could feel pulsing in his heart.

**Author's Note:**

> The title of this story is taken from lyrics to Marika Hackman's _Deep Green_.


End file.
